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Comapq Portable 386 Compact Flash support

NeXT

NeXT

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As part of my job to fix my portable, I got hold of another portable 386 which included the 3 1/2" floppy drive so now I have both the 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" drives. This however means I don't have any room for the IDE hard drive and no idea if I even have the power to handle a hard drive. My idea is to just replace it with a 512mb Compact Flash card but will that work? I don't remember how older BIOSes liked Compact Flash cards.
 
If it takes AT-IDE, it will take a CF - they're identical in protocol. The problem comes in wonky size support in older BIOSes as far as I'm aware. Dunno much about the Compaq Portables, so can't help ya there. If you can/want to use an ISA card to do the IDE, then it's certainly possible though.
 
The ondoard drive controller takes a plain vanilla IDE drive from what I can see which seems bizarre for such an old system.
The BIOS issues are what I'm concerned about. If I fed it a 512mb card, would it even bother to try and use that or is this one of those cases where the CHS support is required.
 
NeXT said:
The ondoard drive controller takes a plain vanilla IDE drive from what I can see which seems bizarre for such an old system.
The BIOS issues are what I'm concerned about. If I fed it a 512mb card, would it even bother to try and use that or is this one of those cases where the CHS support is required.
Click to expand...

Good point. Don't all CF cards operate in LBA mode? It still might work, if your BIOS isn't too fussy, but you'd lose some of the capacity and write speed might be severely impaired.
 
The BIOS in the 386 portable doesn't have a user-defined setting, you can only choose from a pre-set list of drive sizes. I'd put the card in another PC, find out how it identifies itself in terms of cylinders/heads/sectors, then set the Compaq to whichever setting is closest. You'll lose a bit of capacity as iirc most of the largest options were only in the 300-400MB range.
 
As with other old machines, you can use a DDO (Dynamic Disk Overlay) to bypass the BIOS limitations. Since the machine is a 386, it should be easy to find one. I've got a few versions of Quantum's OnTrack DDO, which does work with CF cards (I use it with my Gateway HandBook).
 
I hate to necro a thread but did this work for you? I've got a Compaq Portable 386 on the way and as long as it doesn't show up smashed like the first one then I'd like to do the same setup that you described.
 
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